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2. Religious Establishment Challenged, Destroyed, and Re-formed: The Revolutionary Era

Samuel Auchmuty did not live to see his vision of a unified Anglican Church establishment in New York fulfilled. His successor, Charles Inglis, had a front-row seat to its destruction. Inglis complained that the Church of England’s loyalty to Crown in the 1770s only drew “peculiar envy” from “disaffected” patriots. He reported that in the run-up to Revolution, patriot laymen threatened, verbally abused, and jailed recalcitrant priests. Inglis had personally penned a response to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but patriots had seized the essay directly from the press and destroyed it. Even though the British army occupied New York from 1776 until war’s end, Inglis’s anxiety remained. Fleeing American patriots plundered Inglis’s house. And Inglis suspected that rebels under orders from George Washington set fires in the city. “It really seems the conflagration was directed against the interest of the Church,” wrote Inglis, for the flames consumed Trinity’s building. St. Paul’s Chapel and King’s College, directly in the fire’s path, nearly met the same fate, but alert observers doused their roofs with water, sparing those two prominent Anglican symbols from destruction. For the rest of the war, as the king’s troops marched through the streets of New York, His Majesty’s largest church in the colonies would remain a burned-out husk. After the war, Inglis would leave New York alongside the British troops.¹

This chapter traces the effects of the American Revolution on New York’s Anglican and Methodist churches. Before the Revolution, proto-patriots attacked the Anglican clergy’s vision as hostile to true liberty. During the Revolution, many patriots associated both groups, including their black coreligionists, with loyalism, and after the Revolution patriot lawmakers disestablished New York’s Anglican Church. Such actions fatally destroyed the clergy’s highest aspirations for political influence. Methodists similarly suffered in the shadow of the larger Anglican conflicts, harmed by their ambiguous relationship with the mother body. Yet most churchmen, especially Anglican lay elites who accepted independence, viewed these setbacks as temporary, and continued to embrace a cultural vision for the church that did not rely upon full political establishment. Both groups kept connections to blacks, a group tainted by all-out loyalism, but Americanized themselves by creating greater distance between white and black congregants. By 1790, many Episcopalians and Methodists expected that their institutions would shake off the setback of disestablishment and continue to provide a socially cohesive vision for the city.

Political Battles over Religious Establishment

During the eighteenth century, the political ramifications of religious establishment ebbed and flowed with the changing times. After heated debates in the 1710s, moderate Anglicanism dominated both sides of the Atlantic for an entire generation. But in the 1750s, old battles took on new forms. In the early 1750s, many New York elites championed the creation of a King’s College to match their aspirations in a growing, prospering city. Anglican priests particularly welcomed the college as a necessary Anglican response to Congregationalist strongholds at Harvard and Yale. Many SPG missionaries had been American-born and American-trained, in hostile anti-Anglican environments: Trinity’s rector Henry Barclay had attended Yale; Trinity’s catechist Samuel Auchmuty had gone to Harvard. Such men hoped the college could train the Church of England’s ministers in North America, ending the need for costly trips to England for education. Their influence, and the preponderance of Anglicanism in the governor’s circle, led Anglicans to dominate the original board of trustees. When Trinity’s vestry offered in 1752 to provide thirty-two acres for the college, provided it be Anglican-led, the matter appeared settled.²

Elites initially crossed denominational lines to support the effort, as a college would grant New York new cultural capital. But the attempt to link the school with religious establishment roused religious dissenters. Presbyterian William Livingston, a minority non-Anglican on the board of trustees, led the assault through a series of essays in the Independent Reflector. Livingston strenuously opposed the church-state connection an Anglican college would imply. He particularly attacked the docility and deference that accompanied religious establishment.³

Livingston’s opponents fired back, using the voice of the New-York Mercury, printed by the Anglican layman Hugh Gaine. Like Livingston, these High Churchmen dipped into the well of an earlier era, adopting the polemic of High Church debaters from the 1710s. Such men invoked a sacramental theology that stressed that God’s invisible grace worked through visible signs, as it did in the Lord’s Supper. No less did the visible and invisible intertwine in the working of civil and church laws, and in social and political institutions. In response to the Independent Reflector’s invocation of a state of nature, which they deemed an ahistorical never-land, the Mercury’s High Church champions suggested respect for God-given social and historical precedents. In the proper forms of deference, religion could steer a clear path between the twin dangers of emotional enthusiasm, on one hand, and infidelity, on the other.⁴

Livingston and allies responded in kind, extending the pamphlet war through 1756. The resulting political battles pitted the Anglican governor and council against a largely dissenting assembly. Like the original 1693 church establishment, the resulting compromise granted the college a limited form of Anglican influence. The board of directors would include both Anglicans and dissenters, and the college president would be Anglican. The college would provide a general instruction in Christian morality, without promoting the dogma of any individual sect. While this was technically an Anglican victory, it mostly suggested that support for full political-religious establishment was neither broad nor deep.⁵

The battles over King’s College suggest that the High Church polemic attracted passionate support among the few clergy in the colony, but little beyond. Livingston’s opponents were generally not laity, but clergy. Samuel Johnson was the eldest and most influential of these. Johnson’s protégés wrote the Mercury essays, including New York priests Henry Barclay, Samuel Seabury Jr., Samuel Auchmuty, and Thomas Bradbury Chandler.⁶

For Anglican laity, however, such pure High Church principles were an embarrassment. The Tory principles that clerics championed in their responses to Livingston turned former Anglican allies, including a number of key Dutch Reformed clergy and laity, against the establishment. Opposition to such establishment made strange bedfellows, linking pietist revivalists with rationalist skeptics, radical with moderate Whigs, and opposition politicians with disaffected lower orders. Such unity would repeat in the Revolution. Anglican laymen who sought influence in their communities would rather channel such unity than beat against it.⁷

The King’s College controversy would recur, in a larger register, in the bishop controversy. From the English colonies’ inception, Anglican leadership had periodically tested the idea of establishing bishops in America. But none had seriously promoted the matter after 1720, as British politicians and colonial merchants alike turned their attention to the increase of commerce; none, that is, until the late 1760s. Historian Patricia Bonomi has suggested that the debate over establishing a bishop in the Americas consumed even more paper in the presses than the Stamp Act, and likely swung local elections in New York, where the debate ran hottest.⁸

The debate centered in New York because it was the center of Anglican missionary efforts. Anglican clergy had the ear of the colony’s presses, as the city’s two principal newspapers, the Mercury and Gazette, were both printed by Anglican laymen eager for church business. And clergymen started the debate when an English bishop, in a sermon delivered in support of the SPG, attacked colonial religion for its extremism and disorder, and suggested the planting of bishops as a remedy. As previously, William Livingston debated SPG affiliates or allies, most notably Anglican churchmen Charles Inglis and Thomas Bradbury Chandler.⁹

A minority of British Anglican churchmen considered it wise to plant bishops in the American colonies. Fewer American Anglicans supported the matter; most southern churchmen were dedicated to local lay control over parishes, and northern ones found the SPG’s high Tory principles to be embarrassing, and certainly politically inexpedient after colonists unified to oppose the Stamp Act in 1765. Even ardent High Churchmen who supported a bishop suggested that such an office could be confined to spiritual authority, with no power to coerce colonial subjects. The debate over bishops had few real ecclesiastical results, then, even as it allowed antichurch opposition to coalesce.¹⁰

The Loyalist Taint on Anglicans and Methodists during the Revolution

The pre-Revolutionary debates over High Church establishment, in which patriots attacked church hierarchy and privilege, spilled over into the Revolution. The Revolutionary War undermined the Anglican vision of a unified colonial society. During the war, Episcopalians divided internally over politics and church governance, rejecting the supposed unity that Anglican clergy and SPG missionaries promoted. The Methodist institutional attachment to Anglicanism caused similar strains, and Methodists struggled to define themselves in relationship to their parent church. Both churches’ connections to the British government created a special problem in New York City, where the military occupied the town for most of the war. Patriots (an increasing number of citizens identifying as such as the Continental Army’s position improved) could paint Anglicans and Methodists as not only Tories, but also biracial disgraces, given their support for black evangelization.

New York’s Anglican clergy stressed loyalty to the Crown; in fact, the northern colonies’ Anglican churchmen were the strongest American voices for loyalism during the Revolution, and among the few to offer a coherent ideology. Priests such as New York’s Samuel Seabury had publicly promoted an Anglican King’s College and bishops in America; it was a short trip for him to denounce the emerging patriot cause. In 1774, Seabury wrote several tracts denouncing the delusional and fanatical tendencies of rebellion. He engaged in battle not with a Presbyterian, however, but an Episcopal layman, as then-teenaged Alexander Hamilton penned a series in reply.¹¹

Priestly loyalism meant that, in the run-up to Revolution, Anglican churches suffered where patriots held sway. Trinity’s rector Charles Inglis asserted that north of the Chesapeake, all Anglican clergy (save one lone exception) remained true to Britain. Inglis minimized his loyalism, noting only that his religious duty meant he could not advocate liberty from the pulpit, and had to adhere to the liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer, which included prayers for the king. Trinity, along with all other Anglican churches, also displayed the king’s coat of arms. Consequently, Inglis complained that patriot committees of correspondence closed Anglican churches and harassed loyalist priests. As the British army occupied New York in 1776, Inglis insinuated that fleeing patriot forces burned down the church.¹²

Complicating matters, Anglican suffering under patriot rule disappeared under British oversight. During the British occupation of New York, Anglican churches fared better than other religious groups. Both of Trinity’s chapels and John Street Methodist meetinghouse remained open during the conflict. Believing the Anglican charge that other denominations were havens for dissenting patriots, British officers forcibly closed most other churches. Some Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed congregations suffered the added indignity of serving as hospitals or barracks for British soldiers. But by remaining open, the Anglican Church garnered the same resentments applied to the occupying British army. Condemning British soldiers as licentious and immoral, patriot moralists attributed the same vices to the Anglican churches that soldiers attended.¹³

Further, Trinity Church, rare among New York City’s congregations, included a multiracial vision. Anglican priests baptized and married blacks, and served them communion. During the war Anglicans opened a school for black children. Methodist preachers, too, willingly ministered to blacks, and publicly rejoiced in their participation in revivals and prayer meetings. Such actions may have played a greater role in creating suspicion than the Anglican clergy’s ideological loyalty to the Crown, for blacks occupied a conspicuous place at the bottom of the social hierarchy. When the Revolution offered opportunity for greater freedom, many blacks took advantage: historian Graham Russell Hodges has deemed black actions in Revolutionary New York an eight-year revolt against white New Yorkers.¹⁴

The most obvious threats to white colonists were blacks who joined British military actions. Eight hundred black soldiers trained on Staten Island, their Black Brigade serving as a segregated group within the British regular regiment known as the Queen’s Rangers. Black soldiers’ activities focused on the greater metropolitan area of Westchester County and east New Jersey. Colonel Tye, a runaway slave from a prominent Jersey Quaker, led an interracial group of irregular soldiers in terrorist attacks on patriot farms throughout New Jersey. Tye’s men seized valuable provisions and freed slaves. While some elite loyalists such as Oliver DeLancey grumbled about blacks’ military presence, British officers typically ignored such complaints.¹⁵

More visceral and immediate than military action was the large influx of blacks, mostly runaway slaves, who swelled the population of British-occupied New York City. An outside observer entering the city in the late 1770s might first notice the prominent scarlet-coated uniforms of the British army, for the city remained the army’s headquarters throughout the war, an increasingly beleaguered center as the generals lost ground on the greater continent. But a close second to catch the eye would be the sheer numbers of blacks. Twelve thousand runaway slaves filled the city in 1779 (perhaps as much as half of the wartime population); at the time of British withdrawal in 1783, four thousand remained, despite thousands who fled with the army. The sea of black faces would appear striking in most American colonies north of the Chesapeake.¹⁶

Most of these blacks did not serve as soldiers. Paid less than white laborers, shunted to tent cities in Staten Island or the burned-out West Ward, blacks nonetheless moved freely about the city and earned wages for their labor. They gained employment in rebuilding the charred West Ward in lower Manhattan, where more than one thousand buildings burned alongside Trinity. Others improved the military fortifications in the city and surrounding countryside. Teamsters carted arms from ports to magazines in the town. Black foragers ventured outside city limits to gather scarce foodstuffs to feed the teeming city. Black pilots navigated rivers for these foraging parties, and for British expeditions.¹⁷

Patriots had ample opportunity to complain about the mongrel nature of the British occupation. Patriot sympathizer Henry M. Muhlenberg suggested that the British regiment of blacks was “inclined towards barbarities . . . [and] lacking in human feeling.” Blacks associated freely with British soldiers. Most scandalous to some were the “Ethiopian balls” in which white British officers mingled indiscriminately with African Americans.¹⁸Such criticisms of impropriety could be leveled directly at Anglicans, for their combined support of the British cause and black humanity.

Property and Patriotism: Trinity Rebuilds its Reputation

The traditional interpretation of the Revolution’s effect on the Church of England is that the Anglican clergy’s wartime loyalty to Britain nearly destroyed that denomination at war’s end. In 1782, the SPG withdrew its aid to the American colonies, ending its longtime support for Trinity’s catechists. Many SPG missionaries fled the country, among them Charles Inglis, who finally realized the High Church dream of a bishop in the Americas—in his case, in Nova Scotia. In 1784, the New York state legislature disestablished the Anglican Church, granted all denominations the right to incorporate, and legalized Catholic worship in the state. Further, state-appointed regents took control of King’s College, removing it from Anglican hands and renaming it Columbia. At war’s end, many Anglican loyalists fled the city, removing to havens in Britain or Canada. Lower attendance and smaller offering collections hurt the cash-strapped church. Resentment between patriot laity and loyalist clergy wracked the church in the 1780s. Relations also became strained between the colonial churches and the Anglican headquarters in England. Such conflicts and flagging numbers led some observers to conclude that the Church of England, in America, would not last beyond the Revolutionary generation.¹⁹

Figure 2.1. Charles Inglis, Trinity’s ill-fated Revolutionary-era rector, later bishop of Nova Scotia. (From Morgan Dix, History of Trinity Church, vol. 1 [1898].)

As a branch of the Anglican Church, Methodists risked clear guilt by association. Like the High Church ideologues who promoted Tory principles, Methodist founder John Wesley was an arch-Tory in politics. During the Revolution, Wesley published loyalist tracts suggesting that all Christians should submit to their God-ordained governments. Certainly Methodism’s status as a missionary wing of the church did not help matters, for the mission-focused SPG had been one of the most consistent voices for loyalism before and during the war. In fact, whereas most SPG missionaries had been American-born converts, most Methodist missionaries were British-born, culturally even more removed from the settings where they preached.²⁰

Methodist preachers emphasized that building the kingdom of God was their primary aim, suggesting a commitment to political neutrality. But it might appear that Methodists tended, like their founder, to support the mother country. During British occupation, John Street Methodist Chapel remained open, when army officers forcibly closed all other churches (save the Anglican). Blacks and British soldiers (and black British soldiers) attended John Street, again reinforcing the strangeness and foreignness of the religion in many American eyes. After the war, most British Methodist missionaries left, if they had not been deported already. Such was the case for Thomas Webb, whose military background caused immediate suspicion. Patriot leaders captured Webb, held him as a prisoner of war, and deported him to England in 1778. Webb would never return to the church he helped found. Francis Asbury avoided the same fate by going into hiding. Asbury was virtually the only English minister, and licensed Methodist preacher, to remain at war’s end. He would emerge as the symbolic and real leader of Methodism in America.²¹

As the Revolution ended, many patriot observers labeled New York’s Methodist and Anglican Churches as loyalist and interracial. Both affiliated with a Church of England establishment that Whigs found hierarchical and tyrannical. But while both groups suffered damage to their reputations, neither faced extinction, or irrelevance. Both Methodists and Episcopalians resolved to continue their mission to society. While they deemphasized the colonial imperatives of hierarchy and patronage, they adapted older religious forms to new social realities. Independence muted their message, but did not destroy it.

While Anglican loyalists drew intense opposition, they had been small in number, and concentrated almost exclusively on high government officials and the clergy. Thus when church disestablishment forced most government officials and many priests to flee, few tangible signs of loyalism remained. Instead, an Anglican patriot laity forged a new elitism based upon the protection of property, and welcomed the return of any loyalist (especially those of means) willing to submit to the new government.

The transition from loyalist to Whig to an apolitical unity of wealth occurred quickly. In 1783, Trinity’s loyalist vestry voted to replace the departed priest Charles Inglis with another loyalist, the moderate Tory Benjamin Moore. Fearing a political backlash against their parish, Trinity’s Whigs protested. Using authority granted by the city council, in 1784 these Whigs took control of the vestry, deposed Moore, and replaced him with Samuel Provoost, whose patriot politics made him acceptable to more New Yorkers.²²

The change in church governance accompanied a rearguard action to keep Trinity’s property rights secure. Radical political groups in the city, the Sons of Liberty and Mechanics Committee, promoted the seizure of loyalist properties for the common good. When heirs of the original owner of Trinity’s lands petitioned the New York state assembly to recover their lost property, assemblymen suggested that the lands, initially granted to Trinity by Queen Anne, properly belonged to the state. Trinity attendee Alexander Hamilton led the defense of Trinity’s property, uncovering a deed that kept Trinity’s lands from seizure. Hamilton’s overtures to conservative Whigs also called for lenience toward former loyalists.²³

These local actions paralleled Anglican actions on the national level. In 1785, the Anglican Church in America became the Protestant Episcopal Church, independent of its mother, the Church of England. Liturgical reform proceeded, with American Anglicans editing the Book of Common Prayer to fit its new republican setting. Authority in the new body resided with the laity, who attended and voted in diocesan conferences alongside priestly delegates. The issue of bishops rose again, briefly: when Samuel Seabury emerged as a candidate to be the first United States bishop, in Connecticut, Whig Episcopalians like John Jay and Rufus King (both at Trinity) fumed about Seabury’s Tory views, and complained that the office of the bishop emphasized an unwelcome hierarchy in the church. But after Seabury’s consecration in 1784, patriots gained access to the office: in 1787, Trinity’s Samuel Provoost was elected as bishop of New York, and William White (chaplain of the wartime Continental Congress) was elected bishop in Pennsylvania. After the inclusion of lay checks on clergy, and of patriot clergy on loyalist ones, the old political resentments simply faded away.²⁴

The wounds that the Revolution inflicted upon Trinity parish had healed by the 1790s, since the parish’s patriots genially embraced their former political opponents. The 1784 shakeup that deposed the Tory vestry and rector Benjamin Moore was temporary and had few lasting effects on the church’s governance. Evidence suggests that the men who joined the vestry in 1784 did so from expediency to preserve the church’s property and image, and willingly stepped down when Trinity no longer faced danger. Vestry members who took office in 1784 served, on average, only four years—this was less than half of the eight years of service of the men they replaced. Further, those four years represented less than one-third of the twelve-and-a-half years of average service of the vestrymen who were elected after 1785. Men of unquestionable patriot pedigree such as Richard Morris, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris, Isaac Sears, and Joshua Sands entered the vestry, served a few years, then stepped down. Their formerly loyalist neighbors and associates then returned to lead the church.²⁵ More important than political affiliation, Trinity offered continuity in the social composition of its leadership; in retaining its elite members, Trinity Church implied that hierarchy, privilege, and wealth would provide stability for the parish, in good times and bad.

The Whigs who shook up Trinity’s leadership were reluctant revolutionaries, displaying a moderate and cautious stance in politics. The leader of the group that ousted the wartime vestry, James Duane, had been a careful conservative prior to the war. Duane acted as a liaison for, and sympathetic ally of, arch-loyalist Joseph Galloway. But unlike Galloway, Duane accepted the Declaration of Independence, figuring that “[i]t was more sensible to . . . become a careful neutral and look forward to the ‘rich Encrease of our Estates,’ which would assuredly follow in the wake of free trade with the world.”²⁶ He was joined by men such as John Alsop, who had asserted a modest loyalism by resigning his position in the Provincial Congress after the passage of the Declaration of Independence. Alsop clearly adapted to his situation, marrying his daughter to Rufus King, a Massachusetts patriot and signer of the Constitution, who after marriage relocated to New York.²⁷

Interested in the security of property rights, during the 1780s and 1790s Duane and his political allies welcomed loyalists back into the city, deeming their economic contributions to the city’s prosperity more important than any past political irregularity.²⁸ This welcome extended to the ousted vestry of 1784. Miles Sherbrooke returned from abroad by 1787 to reestablish his merchant business on Little Dock Street. Similarly deposed, William Laight remained in the city, and worked as a merchant on Queen Street. He returned to the vestry in 1788, and served until 1802. His shop stood but a few houses down from the residence of William Bedlow, a Whig who had replaced him. Robert C. Livingston’s Tory sympathies compelled him to remain in London for much of the war, although he occasionally visited British-occupied New York. He returned to the city at war’s end, and in 1785, Livingston began a ten-year term of service as vestryman.²⁹

Elites controlled Trinity Church and its property after the Revolution, as well as before. The new rector, Samuel Provoost, had been a patriot, alone among Episcopal clergymen in the northern colonies. As such, the patriot vestry knew he had the proper credentials to take Trinity’s helm in 1784: political convictions that would silence radical opposition. But Provoost’s credentials were more than intellectual, and appealed to the vestry for other reasons: he was related by marriage to the Livingstons, the wealthiest of the great landed families of the Hudson River Valley. This connection made him kin with John Jay, James Duane, and William Duer, the men who presided over the 1784 transfer of power to patriot interests in the church. The political shift from loyalist leaders in the 1770s to Whigs in the 1780s did not change the fact that a wealthy elite managed the church, and represented its public face.³⁰

While the Episcopalians stressed their patriot bona fides and downplayed the church’s earlier emphasis on hierarchy, the Methodists simply asserted that they were no longer Anglican. In 1784, at the “Christmas Conference,” Methodist leaders voted for an official break with the Church of England. Methodists became a separate church, with their own self-sustaining ministry and administration of the sacraments. In 1789, the denomination sent greetings of congratulation to new President George Washington before any other denomination did so.³¹ Methodism was no longer an English transplant, but an American original. Methodists’ end goal remained the same, to preach the gospel message to all.

Trinity Church’s vestry acted as if the holistic organic vision would revive despite disestablishment. Trinity cooperated with other religious bodies in the city but expected to lead them. As the city’s most prominent church, Trinity’s vestry felt a duty to aid their lesser brothers, just as they had supported the building of the Methodist church. But they modified the organic vision—no longer would all churches eventually join the Church of England, but rather the church might be a first among equals and lead by example. Anglican wealth helped its position.³²

Trinity judiciously parceled out portions of its extensive lands to influence others. When British officers confiscated Garrit Lydekker’s Dutch Reformed Church for a hospital, Trinity’s vestry allowed Lydekker’s group to use St. George’s Chapel for worship. More striking were overtures of friendship to New York City’s Presbyterians, who had been the Anglican Church establishment’s most vocal critics. Trinity’s vestry granted Brick Presbyterian Church the use of its chapels from 1783 to 1784, during a building restoration. Trinity further granted plots to Presbyterian congregations to build parsonages for the church’s ministers. After the Revolution, Trinity vestry implicitly supported the state’s legalization of the Roman Catholic Church, by leasing, then selling, Barclay Street land to trustees of St. Peter’s Catholic Church.³³

Painting the Churches White: Marginalizing Black Presence after the Revolution

The association of blacks with Anglicanism and Methodism hurt the churches’ public images in post-Revolutionary America. Neither group, however, removed blacks from their communities. Trinity’s ministers continued to marry and baptize black members, and restarted the African Free School in 1787 after a four-year hiatus. Methodists allowed blacks to speak at some meetings and organized class meetings where blacks could worship. Even so, both Methodists and Episcopalians more nearly entered the mainstream of American attitudes toward race by marginalizing their black members.³⁴

In dealing with slavery and race, white Episcopalians expressed a condescending benevolence that promised gradual reform. This remained consistent with the humanitarianism the SPG had preached in catechizing blacks the previous century. In 1785, Trinity vestrymen James Duane, John Jay, Robert Troup, and Matthew Clarkson joined with Episcopalian Alexander Hamilton and other leading New Yorkers (including their political rival George Clinton) in founding the New York Manumission Society (NYMS), an institution dedicated to promoting gradual and voluntary manumission among the city’s slaveholders. Trinity’s Anglicans comprised a majority of its non-Quaker founders. Historians have noted the strong Quaker presence in the formation of the NYMS. However, the Anglican presence comprised a significant minority. Indeed, in its first years the society appears to be a nearly exclusive Anglican and Quaker undertaking, an alliance of the old order’s elite politicians and churchmen with a prophetic, energetic, yet commercially connected majority.³⁵

The New York Manumission Society attempted to undermine the worst effects of slavery in New York. It supported bans on out-of-state slave sales in an attempt to choke off the ready market for slaves and push owners toward manumission. NYMS lawyers legally represented free blacks accused as runaways, and filed suits for slaves who had been promised freedom that unscrupulous masters had later repudiated. The society also pushed the state to free slaves of loyalist masters, whom the state had seized and expected to sell.³⁶ As the institution’s title suggested, members advocated for the direct end of slavery, albeit in a gradual and voluntary way. Shortly after the New York Manumission Society formed, the state legislature considered, but defeated, a law to implement gradual manumission. Over the next fifteen years, NYMS leadership would support efforts to push gradual manumission through the legislature, culminating in the successful law passed in 1799.³⁷

Issues of black citizenship were embedded in questions of abolition. To make manumission more palatable to whites, NYMS members also attempted to exhort, and aid, the black community toward moral improvement. In 1787, the NYMS established a school for free blacks. Board members limited pupils to families who were “regular and orderly in their deportment.” In limiting black “vice,” white prejudice might decrease.³⁸ Thus, as patrons and teachers of blacks, society members placed themselves at the top of a social pyramid, in which grateful blacks at the bottom might reciprocate with hard work and clean living.

Joining the New York Manumission Society satisfied multiple parts of conservative Anglican elites’ identities. The attack on slavery mirrored the Revolutionary rhetoric that asserted that all men are created equal, and that none should be held as slaves. Educating and exhorting blacks in efforts to humanize or civilize them placed members in line with the eighteenth-century Anglican mission to touch all members of the empire. Yet NYMS members did so in a way that respected the social order, including the right to property. The NYMS thus affirmed the Anglican conception of an organic society, in which everyone had a place, but tradition and hierarchy made it clear that even in liberty, not all places were equal.³⁹

Less publicly minded Anglicans did resume the connections to blacks that had made the church suspect in the eyes of many colonists during British occupation. Trinity’s ministers resumed the catechization of its black members on Sunday afternoons in the 1780s, an act they continued through the 1790s. A gap exists in the records between the colonial missions and the formation of the black-run parish of St. Philip’s. Nonetheless, church historians surmise that the colonial-era efforts to catechize blacks led to the formation of the black-run parish of St. Philip’s established in 1819.⁴⁰

Early Methodist opposition to slavery did not completely disappear, but the church toned down its early insistence on the unity of all believers in Christ. By the 1780s, racial divisions began to show. Black Methodists approached white ministers with petitions to worship separately, but the white leadership repeatedly denied these efforts. At a 1780 conference, white Methodists resolved that church leaders should meet regularly with blacks, or appoint “proper white persons” in their stead, so that blacks not “stay late and meet alone.”⁴¹

While denying blacks their own space and time for worship, white Methodists nonetheless marginalized blacks within the main body of Methodism. They did so primarily through the organization of the class meeting. Methodist classes were intense prayer meetings in which individual believers could work spiritual disciplines toward greater piety, removing individual tendencies toward sin from their lives. New York Methodist class records that survive from the 1780s reveal that while whites refused blacks the ability to lead themselves religiously, white Methodists nonetheless did not fully accept blacks into the main body of Methodists for worship.

Before the Revolution, no class records for John Street survive; missionary reports suggest that blacks and whites stayed in close contact. After the Revolution, black members were increasingly recorded and regulated in separate classes. In 1785, an unnumbered list of seventeen “Negroes” followed the class lists enumerating all white Methodists in New York, an afterthought to the main body of Methodists. In 1786, the Methodist society records formally placed blacks in their own class of twenty-five, with an addendum to the class lists adding nine more names. In 1787, Methodist leaders standardized their organization of black members, placing them in three clearly defined classes.⁴² Without allowing blacks full self-governance, whites nonetheless shielded blacks from full Methodist fellowship, treating them as second-class citizens in separate classes. These actions made Methodists appear less unusual regarding racial issues, however.

Methodist cultural memories also stressed their patriotic impulses. While most blacks in New York had chosen loyalty to Britain during the war, the most famous Revolutionary-era black Methodist in New York was a patriot. Peter Williams was born a slave in New York City to African-born parents. He converted to Methodism at John Street Chapel in the 1760s, along with his wife, Mary (or Molly). Williams’s master taught him the tobacconist trade. Although his master was a loyalist, Williams reportedly cherished the ideal of liberty that the patriot cause championed, as one oral history later recounted. While in New Jersey during the war, Williams helped a Methodist patriot minister hide from British authorities. The commanding officer pointed his sword at Williams, threatening to kill the slave if he did not reveal the preacher’s position. Williams refused. The officer changed his tack, then offering Williams a purse of money, also rejected. The story, repeated in Methodist circles, had the dual aim of promoting a Methodist minister who was not a Tory or English subject, and championing a black Methodist who similarly refused to join the British.⁴³

Figure 2.2. Old John Street Chapel. This image, often reproduced in different forms and styles in Methodist histories, displays the sexton Peter Williams, patriot, in the doorway. (Reproduced with permission from the Methodist Collections at Drew University.)

Williams’s fleeing Tory owner sold his slave to John Street Chapel. Despite the general Methodist opposition to slavery, Methodist trustees bought Peter and put him to work as a sexton and gravedigger. The chapel apparently allowed Williams to purchase his freedom with his labor, combining a bartered watch and time served to gain his manumission papers in 1796. Thus in the 1780s, as Methodists attempted to integrate into American society, the New York chapel employed a black man in a position most New Yorkers would have recognized: as a slave. Williams’s story entered the lore of New York history generally, and his image often appears in famous historic prints of John Street Chapel, suitably absent the context of widespread black loyalism during the war, or of his own status as a slave for more than a decade.⁴⁴

Not only did New York Methodists downplay their unusual status on race, but they also minimized the presence of loyalism in the church. Another Methodist oral history surviving from the Revolutionary era (again, via Peter Williams) condemned the irreverence and immorality of British soldiers in New York. Williams recounted two instances of British soldiers’ irreligion. In one tale, British soldiers dug a pit outside John Street Chapel for churchgoers to fall into when leaving religious services. In another striking passage, a British officer wore a devil’s outfit to frighten Methodist chapel attendees on Christmas Eve. Both cases ended with virtue rewarded and vice punished, but such stories served a larger role to emphasize Methodist patriotism. The tales obscured the facts that the Methodist church remained open in occupied New York when most other churches were forcibly shut, and that British soldiers attended Methodist meetings.⁴⁵

While Peter Williams’s stories were useful to white Methodists, they highlighted a problem for blacks who remained. Most black New Yorkers had not shared Williams’s support for the patriot cause. Instead, they cautiously, and sometimes incautiously, supported British efforts to gain freedom and to benefit themselves. When British troops left, thousands of blacks left with them. Until then, such actions of revolt had been a regular possibility for blacks in the colonial era. In 1712 and 1741, and from 1776 to 1783, unhappy slaves could forge alliances with poor whites, Anglicans or Methodists, or British or Spanish states to overturn their bondage when their conditions grew too oppressive. But in the new Republic, blacks were under a clearly defined majoritarian regime, one that in fact (and eventually in most states, in law) recognized white superiority.⁴⁶

New York blacks in the early Republic therefore traded revolution for hopes of reform. After 1788, blacks who remained in New York (and in all northern states) gambled that slavery was increasingly in decline, and that such decline would create the possibility of greater rights. They hoped that the language of liberty that patriots invoked in the Revolutionary struggle would truly include a universal promise that would accrue to them. Blacks first pushed for greater reform in the one arena open to them: the church, especially the Anglican and Methodist churches that previously accepted black participants. For churchgoing blacks, this also meant accepting white local church leadership, whether or not such leaders recognized black rights. Eventually, many blacks would form their own, separate, church, representing a possibility of a new revolutionary act. But in the Revolution’s immediate aftermath, black religion would appear less confrontational or dangerous than before.⁴⁷

Anglican and Methodist church leaders probably assumed that their congregations could continue as they had before the Revolution. Trinity Church continued to house society’s most important members, who would dispense the gospel and gradual humanitarian reform as they saw fit.⁴⁸ Cooperation in poor relief and among missionary efforts would be more informal and unofficial than before. The Methodists faced greater possibilities for change, as they now existed institutionally separate from their Anglican mother, but clung to their goals of reaching lost souls with the gospel, and encouraging saved souls to progress toward moral perfection.

New York City’s Methodists and Anglicans could not foresee the greater changes that were in store with the dramatic growth of the city. These changes would strain the conceptions of Episcopalian social prominence and Methodist mission, and ultimately would cause deep fissures between white and black coreligionists. Such problems were not immediately apparent, for after the Revolution most churchmen were simply happy that they had averted complete disaster, that Trinity had not been divested of its property, and that the churches could continue with their missions.